Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Dashboard Design and Full-Spectrum BI

In a recent APOS webinar, SAP's Ian Mayor described SAP BusinessObjects BI 4 as a "full-spectrum" approach to business intelligence. While reporting remains the standard for attaining and maintaining operational excellence, the full spectrum approach to BI complements such reporting with mobility (dashboards and apps) and self-serve BI (agile visualization).

Mobility is one of the key themes in SAP BusinessObjects BI 4. Mobility is often cited by customers as a motivation to migrate. The increased emphasis on mobility and agile visualization are portents of the interactive, proactive and collaborative future of BI. This emphasis recognizes that the vast majority of enterprise employees are now knowledge workers who contribute to the enterprise through their interaction with and analysis of enterprise information.

Nowhere is the bright future of mobile BI more clear than in the increased emphasis on dashboards and Web apps. Mobile BI is no longer just for executives. As the role of the dashboard designer becomes more critical to the evolution of BI within the enterprise, SAP's Design Studio offering unites dashboard and Web app design in a single environment.

Using Design Studio, dashboard designers are building engaging experiences for a wide variety of enterprise users. The trend in dashboards is away from static presentations toward customized and interactive presentations, which not only deliver timely information in an easily digested format, but also allow information consumers to explore the data and find what they need quickly.

The transition to Design Studio is not without challenges, and we recently explored those challenges in an SAP Community Network blog post. You can manage some of those challenges with third-party solutions such as the APOS Dashboard Migrator, which will allow you to leverage your Xcelsius investment within Design Studio.

And, as always, there is help available in the APOS Migration Webinar series, particularly in the upcoming April 24 webinar on Design Studio with SAP's Ian Mayor.

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